Thomas Gaultier
Menu

From the book

The Legacy Grievances companion

The five appendices of Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims, rebuilt here as free working documents: the instruments for auditing a site's history, negotiating who carries its obligations, deciding when it can be relinquished, and the plain-language summary written for the community rather than the company.

2 pages, free

A Summary for Communities

Appendix E, the one part of the book written for the community rather than the company. What a legacy grievance is, why resolution is possible even when the original operator has dissolved, why acknowledgment has to come before compensation, and ten questions to put to whoever owns the site now. It is written in plain language and meant to be copied, translated, or read aloud at a meeting. If you take only one document from this page, take this one, and give it away.

Download the Community Summary (PDF)

2 pages, free

Historical Audit Completeness Checklist

Phase 1 of the resolution pathway as twenty-one items across five domains: environmental history, the community commitment register, legal and concession history, the occupational health trajectory, and the social and cultural impact record. Each item carries a guidance note. The instruction that matters most is in the preamble: mark an item N/A only where the domain is genuinely irrelevant, never where the information was merely hard to obtain.

Download the Audit Checklist (PDF)

2 pages, free

Successor Obligation Negotiation Checklist

Phase 3, in fourteen items across three stages: pre-transaction assessment, contract structuring, and post-closing integration. This is the one to take into a deal room. It is the difference between a buyer who has priced the past and a buyer who has simply acquired it, and several of its items exist because the obligation in question cannot be contracted away no matter what the sale agreement says.

Download the Negotiation Checklist (PDF)

2 pages, free

Relinquishment Readiness Scorecard

Phase 4: seven criteria, each with its threshold and the evidence required, scored Met, Partially Met or Not Met. It exists to stop relinquishment being announced rather than earned. Community validation is one of the seven, which is what separates this from a regulator sign-off sheet.

Download the Scorecard (PDF)

3 pages, free

Community Engagement Charter

The Appendix C template for post-operational settings: preamble, five principles of engagement, the operational commitments that make them more than a statement of intent, and the review and signature blocks. Everything you need to complete is marked in blue brackets. Two of the principles are the ones companies most often try to negotiate away, independently funded community advisors and a process-level grievance mechanism separate from the substantive one, so decide about those before you sit down.

Download the Charter Template (PDF)

4 pages, free

Legal Framework Quick Reference

Appendix B: the four frameworks a legacy claim runs into most often, each reduced to what it actually does to historical harm rather than summarised as an instrument. CERCLA and its retroactive, run-with-the-land reach, the CSDDD as it stands after the 2026 Omnibus reform deleted the harmonised civil liability regime, the IFC Performance Standards, and the UN Guiding Principles. Each closes with a practitioner implication.

Download the Quick Reference (PDF)

4 pages, free

Glossary of Terms

The thirty terms the guide uses precisely, from the after-phase and the legacy multiplex to propter rem, perpetual care, relinquishment and transformative reparations. Settlement drafting goes faster when both sides of the table are working from the same definitions, so this one is worth sharing with the other side early.

Download the Glossary (PDF)

How to use them

They follow the four-phase pathway in Chapter 8. If a claim has just surfaced, start with the audit checklist, because almost every legacy dispute stalls on a record nobody has assembled. If a transaction is in front of you, go straight to the successor obligation checklist. If you are closing a site, the scorecard tells you whether you are ready to hand it over or only ready to announce that you are.

The community summary is different from the other six. It is not for you, it is for the people on the other side, and handing it over costs a company nothing while telling them a great deal about how the process is going to be run.

All of them are free to use in your own organization and with your own clients. Please keep the attribution. They are working templates, not legal advice: adapt the bracketed provisions with qualified counsel before adoption.

Beyond the book

The book itself carries the frameworks these documents compress, the Mozambique Model in operational detail, and the perpetual care obligations that outlast every party to the agreement. Grievance Mechanisms That Work covers the live channel that would have caught these claims before they became historical, and Social Accord Architecture is the discipline both belong to.

Cover of Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims by Thomas Gaultier

New release, and the last one

Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims

The tenth and final volume completes the library. It is the field guide to harm that outlived the operation: transitional justice adapted to corporate disputes, successor liability when the asset changes hands, and the pathway behind more than two thousand resolved claims.